Man, how I hate this phrase. As if they were clumsy and just couldn't hold it in their hands.

PSYCHIC LEMON - Live AD 2017 (download) (2018)

But well, the british psych rockers Psychic Lemon, whose recent album "Frequency Rhythm Distortion Delay" I just reviewed a couple of days ago, have dropped a nice little thingy on bandcamp.

In celebration of their thousandth likeon facebookwe get a free (or pay as much as you want) live EP. It's one half-hour track which includes the four songs "Satori Disko", "Hey Droog!", "White Light" and "You're No Good" - and hell, this kicks ass!

It's a rough recording, but it's highly enjoyable. Psychic Lemon are definitely a tad wilder on stage than in the studio, so anyone who needs some psych excess with a high headbangability somewhere between the "Live At Roadburn" albums from Hillsand The Heads should check this out!

2018-02-08

Forgotten moments of metal greatness:

The silhouette of doom death to come.

Remember that instance during the golden age of death metal in the early nineties, when shortly after the release of Paradise Lost's "Gothic" and Autopy's "Mental Funeral" members of both bands joined forces with their labelmates My Dying Bride and that new finnish group Amorphis?
Since they didn't want to distract the scene too much from the activities of their main bands they chose to remain anonymous, thus the project name Hooded Menace, referrering to the mysterious "Watchmen" character Hooded Justice.

They recorded a whole album, but after its completion the struggles began: at first Autopsy wasn't happy with the mix, because the production wasn't muddy and low-fi enough, and after some back and forth they backed out.
Meanwhile Paradise Lost had left Peaceville and released "Shades Of God" on Music For Nations, who then were unwilling to release the "super group" album, since they didn't want to clash with the release of "Icon". Peaceville agreed to postpone it further, because they wanted to emphasize My Dying Bride's "Turn Loose The Swans"
It was already 1994 then, when Relapse Records stepped on the brakes because they didn't want the album to compete with "Tales From The Thousand Lakes".

Long story short: In the end the release was dragged on and on, until finally all involved just didn't feel it anymore and decided that the momentum was gone.

So how on earth is it that now, almost twenty-five years later, Season Of Mist got their hands on the recordings? Well, that's quite a long story which involves a chase through the dungeons of a doom cultists' temple hidden in the Ural Mountains, almost drowning in an undergound sulphur river and several other incidents worthwhile, but unfortunately a little to complicated to be told here.

And then there's of course the other problem - you called it! - that almost everything I've written so far about "Ossuarium Silhoettes Unhallowed" is bullshit.

HOODED MENACE - Ossuarium Silhoettes Unhallowed (CD) (2018)

At least the names I dropped are not random. Originally coming from a bleaker, even sludgier side of doom death (think of Asphyx or Winter) the finnish band has clearly incorporated more "gothic" and some traditional heavy metal guitar work and harmonies into their sound and full-on thrown itself into the particular spot of death metal history described above.

Not only is the overall tone of "Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed" reminiscent of that style and era, but also a lot of details. Be it the lyrics, which are mostly reduced to rudimentary lines to avoid "normal" words which don't sound a hundred percent like death metal, be it the female spoken words part of "In Eerie Deliverance", the short instrumental outro track "Black Moss" or the cover version of Celtic Frost's "Sorrows Of The Moon" (bonus track of the first CD pressing) - Hooded Menace are heavily checking boxes everywhere.

And damn, they are doing it good!

So in a way this is indeed a nostalgic retro feel-good/feel-sad album. But first of all this is just a sick, very rich and gripping, flawlessly performed work of death metal, which can stand just as successfully today as it surely would have against the genre classics in their time.

The production, helmed by the same guy who recorded and mixed the most recent two back-to-death metal albums of Paradise Lost, leaves nothing to be desired, either.
Consequently I can only give you my full recommandation for "Ossuarium Silhoetees Unhallowed".

Sometimes people (me included) post excess download codes they don't need in facebook groups for the first who is interested to grab it. I recently got the new Psychic Lemon album this way. And since it is really freaking good, I decided not just to silently enjoy it, but at least to give the english band some love here. The genre (surprise!) is psychedelic rock.

PSYCHIC LEMON - Frequency Rhythm Distortion Delay (2018)

"Frequency Rhythm Distortion Delay" luckily doesn't require a long and winding review, because the title alone pretty much sums most of what it's about up.

But to throw in some related contamporaries, I would say that these five songs - each running from around seven to ten minutes - can be described as a mixture of Hills, White Hills, a little more Hills (vocals) and hints of Lumerians.

The production is very clean, modern and powerful - in a completely all good way. Ok, if you want me to nitpick: there are passages where I'm not to keen of the snare drum sound.
But all in all Psychic Lemon create an addictively hypnotic, fast-paced, sometimes surprisingly heavy journey, which showcases all the best qualities of the genre.

And if this isn't your first time reading something on this blog, you might know that I love me some saxophone, so the occasional guest appearance of the wind instrument rounds "Frequency Rhythm Distortion Delay" up to a fuzzy eleven. Great stuff!

2018-01-25

After the fabulous new album of Sinistro,Doom January continues with a band that also sets itself apart from most metal bands via use of "exotic" native language.

Let's face it: Even though you don't hear too many bands singing in Portuguese, there are about 270 million people out there in the world who can understand Sinistro's lyrics. That's almost three times as many as those who can understand German, so there's a huge potential market.

It's probably much bolder to use a language only spoken by 300.000 people, like several bands from Iceland like Sólstafir, Misþyrming or Auðn are doing it. But while Iceland may be one of the most prolific players in the game of culturally exporting its unique features, the true connoisseur of lingual exclusivity turns his attention to that rough island group halfway between Iceland and Norway, where only 50.000 residents speak their own tongue: Enter Hamferð from the Faeroe Islands!

HAMFERÐ - Támsins Likam (LP) (2018)

Hamferð consists of six band members (vocals, two guitars, bass, keyboards, drums), which given the available population is quite a lot of people willing to play this kind of no nonsense / no sunshine music. How uncompromising they are showed back in 2012, when they won the Wacken Metal Battle and with it a Nuclear Blast record deal, but they declined it, instead releasing their debut album on the Faroese label Tutl.

Slow forward five years later their second album just came out on Metalblade.
"Támsins Likam" is a sad and lightless affair. Musically Hamferð are sitting between funeral doom (Loss) and doom death (My Dying Bride, but meaner) with gothic sprinkles, which are never sweet or cheesy, and passages of classic epicness, which must mainly be attributed to singer Jón Aldará, whose voice is truly remarkable and lifts the already compelling arrangements onto another level.

He alternates between strong aggressive death metal grunts and his clear voice, which in somber passages reminds me of Boris Benko from the slovene synth pop band Silence (also appearing on Laibach's "Volk" album), while in full majesty also adding layers of all Candlemass vocalists and the mightyDamian Wilson, and despite all the operatic feel he somehow does it without sounding like a traditional heavy metal siren.
Even though I don't understand a word - the cover artworks hints of Faroese ghost lore, which would be a clear thematic parallel to Bell Witch - the vocals convey so much raw emotion, that not knowing their meaning actually becomes a benefit, because you can project all the more of your own imagination into it. (Which is probably the main reason for enjoying foreign-language lyrics in general.)

Apart from the vocals "Támsins Likam" has no place for showboating. The instrumentalists are all doing a decent job, where everything is in the right place and all is subordinated to the mood and songwriting. This also includes the guest musicians on strings and piano, as well as the choir arrangements.

This album is (emotionally and in death/doom metal terms) heavy and thrillingly dark. It is perfectly rounded and I can't find anything which it leaves to be desired.

Of course there are lots and lots of doom bands out there today, but in my ears Hamferð's work here has the full potential to become a future classic.

The LP version comes with a lyrics + credits sheet and a poster of the cover artwork. The quality of my vinyl copy is flawless.

2018-01-09

Yeah, right. I'm late with my December tradition of looking back on my year in photography.

The thing is not only that I didn't shoot that many films - and those mainly during the first half of 2017 -, but also that probably half of that stuff (if not more) isn't internet-ready yet. That means I have scanned the negatives, but not cleaned the dirt off them and resized them to web resolution.

And if I haven't optimized my pictures yet, I tend to forget them, so even though I haven't produced an overwhelming amount of photography last year, I have an astonishingly bad overview about what I've done.

Finally there's of course that one 35mm film in one of my La Sardinas, which I needed months and months to fill. Well, there are indeed still a couple of frames left.

So all in all I'm by far not ready to do a proper review of my shit. But I I want to have it done now, so I'll wing it somehow and probably miss one or two things.

Let's start not with film, but with the two digital themes which went through the whole year and were hardly to miss on this blog:

1. My 52 weeks of Lensbaby Sunday, presenting one digital shot taken with the Lensbaby lens each week. Did it stir some new interest and energy in experimenting with my DSLR and this lens? Honestly, not really. Most times I just cranked out something in the last minute. But I also did a couple of nice series, so while not a giant photographic kick this also wasn't for nothing.

Here are a couple of random impressions from my Lensbaby year:

2. Of course I shot tons of trashy concert pictures with my Harinezumi cameras again. The newer one, the Harinezumi 4.0 however only lasted until April. It was obviously not designed to be used as often and frequent as I did. On the Sunday of Roadburn Festival its internal battery was empty and couldn't be recharged anymore. Definitely disappointing.

Here are some of its last concert pictures:

And here's the final image before the camera died:

Luckily my Harinezumi 3.0 still lives. Here are come concert pictures I took with it:

Of course I have to mention one shot in particular! I was pretty pleased with my whole set from the Esben And The Witch show at Roadburn, and since that also was one of my favorite shows there, I'm very happy that this picture...

During the rest of the summer I shot some nature and family pictures...

Kiev 88

Kiev 88

Kiev 88

Kiev 88

Kiev 88

Kiev 88

Kiev 88

... had very little tourism time between the Prophecy Fest days...

Rich Cam (one-way-camera)

Rich Cam (one-way-camera)

Adox Golf

Adox Golf

... filled the roll in my Adox Golf in Hamburg...

Adox Golf

Adox Golf

... and that was it. I think.

Except for that one film that's still in in my La Sardia Belle Starr of course.

I can't really decide for a definite "favorite picture of the year" this time. Well, if I really had to, I'd choose that Esben And The Witch photograph. Having a Harinezumi picture in the artwork of a "live at Roadburn" album was kind of on my bucket list after all. And it is a good photo, so yeah, that one I guess.